In 2022, I revealed in an online article for Skeptical Inquirer that I was victimized by a romance scam after the death of my longtime partner. I thought it was important to share that story so others reading about my experience would learn to recognize the tell-tale giveaways that distinguish scams from genuine attraction between individuals.
Recently, I’ve been dealing with another aspect of loss: regret for not saying goodbye to my late sister. We’d been estranged for some years before she died, and I’ve been revisiting the conditions that led to that estrangement and the consequences of it: unfinished business.
Growing Old: Better Than the Alternative?
I’ve outlived so many people; some were older than I was—parents, aunts, uncles, and teachers. Their deaths coming while I was still growing up seemed normal; being born, living a full life, and dying at the end seemed consistent with expectations. Some people who have died, though, have been my contemporaries: fellow Baby Boomers who I remember from my childhood through adulthood and with whom I shared the triumphs and tragedies of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
My great-aunt, who was an older sister of my grandmother, was one of the first elders in my family to die while I was young. She recited fairy tales when she babysat us and told us bedtime stories. She had a radio in her apartment for entertainment; now I fall asleep with a movie playing on my iPad, occasionally modern adaptations of the same classic fairy tales.
My parents died twenty-six years apart; my mom never remarried. Whenever I asked her why she wasn’t dating, I thought her response was kind of funny: “Why would I want to take care of some old goat?” I have now reevaluated that response. It’s not so funny; it’s very practical. The ability to give mutual support seems to be unpredictable. Our family witnessed that in real time: one of my aunts did remarry after being widowed, but her new husband had dementia. It was a painful, tragic experience.
The first death of a friend I remember was that of a school mate who’d shown us the ink marks on her torso that were probably targets for radiation therapy. We knew she was sick, but for a bunch of elementary school kids, the tragedy and finality of the death of a classmate was incomprehensible. We were not invited to the funeral. I remember walking around the block to her house but not what her mom said when she answered the door. But I knew after that my friend wasn’t at home anymore.
Much later, death for my generation was a literal roll of the dice, a lottery based on one’s birthday. Dying young in Southeast Asia was a reality that was on the news at dinnertime every night. It was that reality that was at least partly responsible for my decision to marry at age eighteen and become a mother at age twenty. There were fewer and fewer draft deferments to exploit if one didn’t want to risk dying in an unpopular war. Marriage had been one but was discontinued. Getting married and becoming a father was how some young men escaped military service.
Only one friend died a victim of garden-variety urban violence. When I was twenty-one years old, I dialed the phone number of the parents of an old friend (I’ll refer to him as Buddy); his father answered. I asked for Buddy, and his father sobbed that he had died and hung up. I called back the next day and talked with Buddy’s mom; she invited me to come with her to visit his grave. She picked me up and drove us to a beautiful Jewish cemetery. I didn’t know how to cope with my sense of loss. My friend and I really had not been in touch for years; we each had married, although Buddy and his wife didn’t have any children and were divorced. “Under the circumstances,” his mother said, “it’s probably better this way.” She had been able to think through the even greater tragedy of children growing up without a father.
Buddy’s mom explained that he had been driving home from his office and had picked up a couple of hitchhikers. They killed him, threw his dead body off a cliff in the Hollywood Hills, and stole his car. His body was discovered by hikers, but the case languished in the criminal justice system for years, Buddy’s parents knowing only that he never came home from work. Finally, one of the hitchhikers was picked up on another charge and confessed to a murder. The confession was linked to the unidentified body that had been found in a canyon in the hills above Hollywood and the missing persons report.
Buddy’s mom took me out to lunch and propped up a little photo of him on the salt shaker on our table at a deli; I only recently fully understood the significance of this gesture. (After my partner died, I took a much greater interest in sorting and looking at pictures of him.) She took me home, and I never tried to see her after that. I’d had a crush on Buddy for years. We were never more than friends, but I think that was the first time I’d experienced a confrontation with the finality of the end of life. I was processing the loss, the change in who I thought was still “out there” somewhere. It was a distraction from my real life, my child, and my marriage; they needed my attention.
Species Doesn’t Seem to Matter When You Love and Lose
Some years later, I had a cat who wasn’t spayed. She bore her litter of kittens in my bedroom closet. Most were tuxedo cats like their mother; one, though, looked like a different branch of the family. I called him “Sneaker” because his fur looked like a dirty white tennis shoe and also to honor the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. I found homes for all the other kittens but kept Sneaker. We loved each other.
One night I was in my bedroom reading, and my husband came in to tell me that my cat was dead. He took me to see the cat’s still body on the driveway pavement where he’d been hit by a neighbor’s car. We scooped him up on a little board and took him to the veterinary hospital, but he was DOA. Instead of trying to be supportive and sympathetic, my husband drove away in the night and was gone for several days. It may have been that my husband was processing his own grief, but that’s a generous interpretation; it was what it was. I happened to be working at a nonprofit that supported educational programs for a zoo, and everyone at work, all animal lovers, expressed sympathy and understanding about my emotional devastation. I’d say later, even after I’d experienced other losses, that this was my first real experience of grief. I cried; I looked at pictures of my cat. Every sentence I started was either directly or indirectly about my cat. The emotional pain was distracting and constant, and waves of it lasted for years.
Later, after the deaths of my father, mom, friends, and relatives, when I compared how I felt when they died or even the dissolution of each of my marriages, the losses were not as painful as the loss of my cat.
When my father died, it was after decades of treatment for cardiovascular disease, multiple open-heart surgeries, and many hospitalizations. Instead of pain, his death seemed to bring relief. When my mom died, it was after years of gradually increasing disability and finally dementia. She trusted me to take care of her day-to-day business affairs, coordinate the cycle of daycare nurses, supervise a rotation of family members so she had visitors every day—a huge responsibility. (The worst part of growing older, outliving one’s partners and friends, is isolation and loneliness in our homes. I can see now why my grandmother, great-aunt, and their widowed friends found apartments near each other; they were within walking distance of each other and kept each other company.)
Sometimes I find out about the death of an old friend via social media. The death of a childhood friend and neighbor was described on Facebook by her sister, and there were comments and tributes by members of her family. Since then, I’ve become much closer to her younger sister. Just this morning, I saw a status update about the death of a son-in-law of a friend I haven’t seen face-to-face for about ten years. It’s a little disconcerting, but it’s just taking the place of the obituary section of newspapers.
My partner of thirty years died when we were sixty-eight years old. The pain of this loss eclipsed the pain I’d felt after my cat died.
Previous experiences with loss did not prepare me for this degree of pain and the accompanying inability to reason. I made many mistakes that I never would have made otherwise. My skepticism failed me. It was as if I had a giant note taped to my forehead that said “Take whatever you want. This idiot will believe whatever BS story you tell her.” Before my partner died, I was generous but not stupid. After he was gone, I was unmoored. It’s not as if I ever asked him for advice or approval; it was more as if my idea of myself had changed, and the new me didn’t have the framework to compare and contrast input, evaluate claims, or ask the right questions. It was as if I were only hearing every other word anyone was saying to me, and it lasted for years. In the case of the romance scammer, my daughter happened to hear me talking about it, and she shared what she knew about catfishing.
Skeptics and Psychics
Although my previous experience was not associated with a so-called psychic, there is something in the shared concern among skeptics about vulnerability to psychic scams for which I’d like to propose a remedy. It only works if the grieving person believes in life after death as an opportunity to make last wishes known. I think whatever closure the psychic scammers offer can be anticipated and become unnecessary by better communication with friends and family—defensive, preneed planning for our minds.
There is evidence (although recently disputed) that our Neanderthal ancestors conducted ritual burial. The dispute is over the source of the pollen found at the burial sites. It was thought by some researchers that Neanderthals placed flowers on the graves of their dead loved ones because pollen was found in and around the graves in Shanidar cave in northern Iraq; an alternate theory is that bees deposited the pollen. But this article explains that the source of the pollen does not constitute a conflict over whether Neanderthals cared for their dead.
A CNN report on an analysis of a Neanderthal burial quotes Chris Hunt, a professor emeritus at Liverpool John Moores University in the United Kingdom:
While Hunt and his colleagues’ work suggests that the flower burial hypothesis is incorrect, the recent work on Shanidar Cave Neanderthals supports the underlying message of the old theory: that Neanderthals treated their dead with care.
The cave itself seems to have carried some sort of meaning, since the skeletons in it were interred separately, years apart. “As far as I can see, they must have had stories in their groups about, ‘Well, this is what we did with Grandma, and now that young Joe has died, perhaps we should put him in the same place,’” Hunt said.1
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So the concept of life after death, in whatever form it takes from various mythologies throughout the ages and across geographical boundaries, isn’t limited to contemporary religious traditions.
When my partner died, a friend who didn’t know my humanist/atheist/skeptical leanings said something that I found unexpectedly comforting: she said we would see each other in Heaven. I think I get it. The prospect of death being final—inevitable and eternal—and involving permanent separation from one with whom one has a strong, mutual bond is pretty hard to accept. A custom that posits reunion, even in the absence of evidence, is good news. I turned this thought over in my mind for weeks. It was not that I believed it, but I understood for the first time why it was the appropriate, loving thing for friends and family to say to each other.
Unfortunately, not everyone who offers kind words when we are grieving has our best interests at heart. Sometimes, people are moving in on a mark. The so-called psychic is counting on the belief that the loved one has a message to share from wherever they are to their loved ones who are still breathing. I’m not trying to say not to believe it or try to persuade anyone else not to believe it. I’m saying “get those words said to each other while we are all still breathing.”
What Happens When We Don’t Talk about Deep Stuff
My regrettable mistake was that I bore a grudge. My sister and I were very different people; we weren’t friends. I always thought I wanted a twin sister, but I couldn’t even be friends with the sister I had. I actually learned a lot from her; she taught me the definition of a dysfunctional family, but I also thought of her as annoying, so I rarely chose to spend time with her. After enduring an especially stressful experience over scheduling the visits with our mother, I warned her that if she didn’t try to be more helpful, that, after our mom died, I didn’t want to ever talk to her again. But I don’t think she believed it, because she didn’t try to cooperate. So, after our mother died in 2014, I only spoke with her twice. I’d occasionally see her from a distance because we lived in the same neighborhood. But I never called her or went to see her. Nobody told me she was sick, let alone that she was dying; I found out that she’d died only because our aunt saw her obituary, and my cousin sent a message of sympathy. At first, I didn’t feel anything. Then I learned that I had been appointed the administrator of her estate (similar to an executor). I had to organize and review all her financial and personal papers, including photos, diaries, letters, and the things she’d saved that belonged to our parents.
I began to have questions that I wished I could ask her. I wanted to apologize for not being there for her when I began to understand how isolated she had been and that she had to rely on her boyfriend’s family because her own sister wasn’t there for her. But I can’t.
I can’t go to a psychic to transmit messages between us. I can’t expect to see her in Heaven after my life is over.
Talk
But what I can do is tell the people who can still hear me that I love them; I can try to straighten out misunderstandings, find areas of agreement, accept areas of difference, be kind, and not leave anything unsaid. My family won’t think they’ll need to see a psychic.
Note
1. Kate Golembiewski, “A ‘Flower Burial’ Unearthed in 1960 Reshaped the Study of Neanderthals. A New Discovery Calls It into Question.” CNN. September 6, 2023. Available online at https://www.cnn.com/2023/09/06/world/neanderthal-burial-flower-pollen-scn/index.html.
In 2022, I revealed in an online article for Skeptical Inquirer that I was victimized by a romance scam after the death of my longtime partner. I thought it was important to share that story so others reading about my experience would learn to recognize the tell-tale giveaways that distinguish scams from genuine attraction between …